Ideas and Observations

Charlotte Allen

The White Elephant on the Potomac

Autumn 1993

More than
two decades after its completion in 1971, Washington, D.C.s massive John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts still receives reverential treatment
in the press and public mind. It is a shrine, after all: a national temple of
high culture and the nations only official monument to the dead president.
The Kennedy Center is also formidably large. It is a multi-hall complex—what
Lincoln Center might be like if all its symphony, opera, dance, and theater
spaces were under one roof, packed into a giant marble-clad shoebox. Looming
over the Potomac, the Kennedy Center is impossible to miss from the several
roads and bridges leading into the District of Columbia.

Nonetheless, the center has been a disappointment from the very beginning.
Few Washingtonians have ever really liked the design by Edward Durrell Stone.
The center has never been able to break even financially, even though the
National Park Service pays for the maintenance of the buildings and grounds
as a national monument. It has never quite lived up to artistic expectations
either; its musical and theatrical fare has flailed between the dazzlingly
original and (much more often) the mind-numbingly middlebrow. Finally, the
Kennedy Center is physically falling apart after only 22 years, despite
several major structural repairs.

Built upon the promise that it would be entirely self-supporting, the
Kennedy Center needs, or at least consumes, ever-larger federal subsidies and
bailouts in order to keep raising its curtains. While some might wonder
whether it is worthwhile—or fair—for the nations taxpayers to pick up an
increasing share of the centers bills, its current chairman, James D.
Wolfensohn, has been trying to reposition the Kennedy Center so that it will
stay on the government dole forever. He wants Congress to turn it into a
full-fledged autonomous government institution.

As a concept, the Kennedy Center has been through a number of
permutations. The idea for a “national cultural center” predated Kennedys
presidency by several years. It was the height of the Cold War, and many in
Washington thought of art as an extension of war by other means. The Soviet
Unions Bolshoi Ballet, with its international luster and technical
virtuosity, represented a cultural threat to American interests akin to the
nuclear threat of the Soviets weapons arsenal. There was also a push to
build a national auditorium of a size and splendor deemed suitable for the
capital of the free world (the citys existing concert halls and theaters,
most of which are still in use today, were considered too puny to impress
Americas allies and enemies).

Congress set up a commission in 1955 to devise a plan for the new
auditorium. The commission came back two years later with a design (later
translated by Stone into drawings) that was Stalinesque in proportions: a “great
hall” seating ten thousand people, which would be used for presidential
inaugurations, flanked by several other huge theaters. The commission also
picked the site on the Potomac where the Kennedy sits today: a rolling 17.5
acres (the original design called for 27 acres and would have encompassed all
of what is today the Watergate complex) far away from the rest of downtown
Washingtons nightlife. High culture and bucolic settings went together in
the commissions thinking.

President Eisenhower, a Republican who did not believe that the Federal
Government should involve itself in arts funding, insisted that the center
should be constructed with private funds raised by its board of trustees; the
government would contribute only the land on which it was built. With that
proviso, Congress approved legislation for the culture palace in 1958.

Fund-raising proved to be murder from the very beginning. From 1959 to
1961, the trustees raised only $3 million out of the $75 million (about $375
million in todays dollars) that architect Stone estimated it would cost to
build his version of the commissions plan: a glass-fronted clamshell whose
grand salon would be accessible by barge from the Potomac. The trustees
ordered Stone to substitute a cheaper design. He scrapped the inaugural hall,
reduced the size of the theaters, and gave the building a rectangular shape.
Perhaps it as the haste in which Stone made his changes, but he neglected to
include any office space in the outsize building. Windowless rabbit warrens
were later carved out alongside the theaters for the staff.

Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy became president. An admirer of André Malraux,
the novelist and existentialist philosopher who became Frances minister of
culture under de Gaulle, Kennedy liked to talk about arts “spiritual”
dimensions, giving the planned center a quasi-religious aura as a temple
consecrated to the sacred power of art. For all his high-flown boosting,
however, Kennedy raised relatively little in additional donations for the
center. He did, however, begin a process of quietly arranging for the Federal
Government to pick up some of the construction tab, working out a deal (never
consummated) to have the Interior Department pay for the parking garage.

In the end, it was Lee Harvey Oswald who got the Kennedy Center built.
Within two months of Kennedys assassination, the centers board sold the
project to Congress as a monument to the late president, persuading lawmakers
to cobble together a $31 million loan-and-grant package to finance
construction. Digging began in December 1964. It was not the ideal time to
hollow out frozen earth, but Roger Stevens, the centers first board
chairman, who had played a major role in wringing the construction funds out
of Congress, wanted a hole in the ground as soon as possible. Erection of the
center took nearly seven years, delayed by union bickering, architectural
squabbles with Stone, and $20 million in cost overruns that Congress gamely
covered. The center ended up having to repay almost nothing on its
construction loans. Congress forgave $33 million in accumulated interest in
1984 and virtually forgave some $20 million worth of unpaid principal as
well, putting the center on a long-term repayment schedule at a mere $200,000
a year.

The year after construction started, nearby National Airport received
permission to handle jet aircraft, necessitating costly insulation of the
Kennedy Centers roof, walls, and windows. Stevens tried to save money
elsewhere by soliciting some of the centers trimmings—stage curtains, chandeliers,
and the like—from friendly foreign governments. Italy chipped in with 3,700
tons of Carrara marble to face the exterior. Unfortunately, that was far from
sufficient to meet Stones specifications for an 8-inch-thick coat for the
building. So the contractor settled for a seven-eighths-inch-thick “skin” of
marble bonded to a concrete slab. The experiment in cost-cutting proved to be
a long-term mistake, for the marble veneer has gradually begun detaching
itself from its concrete backing, resulting in cracks, chips, and buckling
all over the Kennedy Centers surface. The flat, heavy roof has also proved
structurally problematic. Built to ward off noise, the roof apparently was
not built to withstand rain and snow, and there have been several multimillion-dollar
repairs to it and to the centers chronically flooding parking garage—paid
for by Congress, of course.

Stones oversimplified design for the Kennedy Center, grandiose in concept
but executed on the cheap, yielded a building impossible to love. With its
lidlike roof and quadriform shape, the center resembles nothing so much as a
colossal replica of a plastic Kleenex-box holder. Inside, two 260-foot-long
flag-hung corridors, the Hall of Nations and Hall of States, trisect the
building into the spaces for its three ground-floor theaters. Both corridors
end at the Grand Foyer, an enormous 40-foot-wide room that runs the entire
630-foot length of the building (you could lay down the Washington Monument
inside the Grand Foyer and still have 80 feet to spare). Acres of
lipstick-red wall-to-wall carpeting cover the floor, crystal chandeliers
weighing a ton apiece hang from the ceiling, and what are surely the worlds
largest living-room drapes shade a row of 60-foot-high aluminum-framed
windows facing the Potomac.

Simultaneously forbidding and tacky, pretentious and cheesy, the Kennedy
Center impresses Washingtonians but has never managed to win their hearts. It
doesnt help that the site is physically and psychologically remote from the
rest of Washington, cut off by a fettuccine Alfredo of expressways that
channel commuters back and forth from suburban Virginia. Even the nearest
subway stop is a roundabout ten-minute walk away.

“Sometimes you dont like something at the beginning, but you sort of warm
up to it as time passes,” the Washington Posts architectural critic,
Benjamin Forgey told Washingtons City Paper. But “with the Kennedy
Center, you dont warm up to it. Its not a fun place to be. The best you can
say about the building is that you can walk around the terrace and get this
wonderful view of everything.”

Some five million tourists a year visit the Kennedy Center, but they
generally dont stay long. Despite the Periclean expectations of those who
conceived of a national arts palace, high culture isnt much of a draw for
out-of-town visitors. When the center first opened, wild-eyed JFK fans tore
out light fixtures, faucets, and chunks of marble to take home as mementos of
their assassinated hero. Nowadays, visitors tour the place strictly to marvel
at how anything could be that big (and boring) and to take in the spectacular
trans-Potomac view. They pay scant attention to the centers hagiographic
cynosure: a seven-foot-high disembodied head of JFK in the Grand Foyer that
looks as though it was cast out of chunks of bronze-coated denture fixative.
Kennedy Center administrators seem aware that the building is not
particularly tourist- friendly and have considered livening it up with
interactive television screens.

Artistically, the Kennedy Center is a victim of its size. As a one-stop
performing-arts center (a concept of the synergistic Sixties that also
accounts for Lincoln Center and Los Angeless Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), the
Kennedy Center houses a total of six theaters on two floors: a 2,750-seat
concert hall, a 2,250-seat opera house, a 250-seat screening room (leased to
the American Film Institute), and three stage auditoriums. To fill these
spaces and make them pay, the centers administrators have always leavened
the highbrow fare for which the center was planned with lower-order
offerings. The Kennedy Centers 365-day-a-year programming menu offers an
eclectic range that includes grand opera, chamber music, Shakespeare,
Broadway road shows, pre-Broadway tryouts, lite-listening pops, gospel, and
Christmas carols.

After a gala opening in September 1971 that featured the premiere of
Leonard Bernsteins specially commissioned (and now mercifully forgotten) Mass,
the Kennedy Center settled into what it is today: a prestigious booking house
for shows and performers either from or headed for out of town. Part of the
reason for that was the personality of Stevens himself, who reigned over the
center until 1987 and tried to cast it in his own likeness. Stevens had been
a Broadway producer before his tenure as chairman, and his specialty was
splashy Broadway productions, not originality. When he retired, his
handpicked successor, Gordon Davidson, continued his programming style, and
Wolfensohn, the Kennedy Centers third chairman, has made few changes.

Some of the Kennedy Centers productions—including a run of Robert
Schenkkans Pulitzer-winning The Kentucky Cycle scheduled for this
fall—have been or promise to be artistically first-rate. The well-regarded
but money-losing National Symphony Orchestra uses the Kennedy Center as its
home base (and was operationally absorbed into the center in 1986). The
Washington Opera Company and Washington Ballet also call the Kennedy Center
home. Superstar classical performers and troupes such as Itzhak Perlman and
the Joffrey Ballet play the Kennedy Center when they are in town. But the
center has no resident acting company, an unheard-of situation for a national
theater. The largest of its three stage halls, the Eisenhower Theater, lay
dark for much of the 1992-93 season. The moneymaking hit of the Kennedy
Center has been Shear Madness, a distinctly subbrow comedy/whodunit
about hairdressers that has been running for seven years in the Theater Lab,
a 250-seat upstairs showroom that was originally supposed to be reserved for
the avant-garde and artistically experimental. Shear Madnesss success
has inspired the Kennedy Center to mount several other laugh-a-minute
crowd-pleasers in its smaller performing spaces.

The fact that the Kennedy Center must mount mass-audience fare to fill its
massive spaces points to an even more serious problem: the center is almost
always in the red, even with an ever-escalating and ever-more-imaginative
array of federal subsidies. Not only does the National Park Service pay for
its entire plant upkeep and security, but the Education Department also funds
an expanding array of programs for schoolchildren and workshops for their
teachers. The only aspect of the Kennedy Center that federal tax dollars do
not subsidize—at least in theory—is the $60 million annual cost of producing
and mounting performances. But even there, the center expects occasional
bailouts, despite hefty ticket prices and vigorous fundraising from
individuals and corporations.

If Wolfensohn has his way, the umbilical cord linking the U.S. Treasury to
the Kennedy Center will become a veritable gas pump. In fiscal 1989, Congress
allotted the center a mere (by todays standards) $7 million: $6 million to
the Park Service and $1 million to the Education Department. As soon as
Wolfensohn took over, the annual subvention began to top $20 million. Last
year, the center lobbied for a bill that would have guaranteed it some $158
million in congressional appropriations over five years.

Most significantly, the Wolfensohn-backed bill would have eliminated the
role of the Park Service and Education Department as funding middlemen. The
Kennedy Center would have assumed independent bureaucratic status as an
originator of “national performing arts education policy and programs” with
discretion to contract for its own repairs and capital improvements. It would
have become an autonomous bureau on a par with the National Gallery (which
gets a $50 million annual direct appropriation from Congress) and the
Smithsonian Institution—or, in some ways more pertinently because of its
expected funding activities, with the National Endowment for the Arts and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

The thoroughgoing transformation that Wolfensohns proposals contemplated
proved too much for Congress to digest in 1992. He nevertheless came away
with a record $24 million for capital renovations, maintenance, and
educational programs. For fiscal 1994, he plans to ask Congress for $33
million. He has also been hinting lately that he might jump ship if the
Clinton administration does not help him push through legislative changes—as
yet undrafted—that would ensure the Kennedy Center both autonomy and a large
and steady subsidy stream. “It can limp along and it can grow some deficits
until someone bails it out, but it wont do it on my watch,” Wolfensohn
grumbled to the New York Times in April. In a May 12 memo obtained by
the Washington Times, Wolfensohn told White House Chief of Staff
Thomas McLarty that the Kennedy Center was “technically bankrupt” and needed
an additional $8 million to $9 million to meet its overhead bills and retire
accumulated debt.

One may blame the Kennedy Centers ad hoc programming mix and chronic
money problems on Stevens and his successors. But the reality may be that a
national cultural center was never a good idea for Washington. In other U.S.
cities, it is taken for granted that high culture is for an elite. Possessors
of large fortunes provide patronage to the arts, and cultivated people of
lesser means—academics, artists, writers—fill out audiences. In Washington, a
city with few large private fortunes or first-rate universities and not much
of an arts community, the Federal Government has tried to play arts patron by
default. In more optimistic times, many even hoped that the government could
create a mass market for high culture simply by constructing a massive
building to house it.

Because that market has never materialized, the Kennedy Center has had to
lard its programs with pops, Broadway reruns, and the everlasting Shear
Madness—just to keep the doors open. This tactic—using revenues from
money-making middlebrow fare to underwrite money-losing highbrow fare—is
actually to the Kennedy Centers credit. But it does undercut the Kennedy
Centers original raison dêtre as a culture palace and make one wonder
whether it is worth its overhead. The National Symphony could play in a less
expensive but more conveniently located hall downtown. The pop offerings may
be better suited for Washingtons several newly refurbished commercial
theaters. Indeed, the Districts most artistically creative stage offerings
play in small houses miles from the Kennedy Center.

Wolfensohn seems aware that marketing the Kennedy Center as a national
performing-arts showcase is always going to be a tough sell. So as he presses
Congress for levels of funding that would have been undreamed-of in years
past, it is interesting to watch him subtly reposition the Kennedy Center as
an indispensable federal bureaucracy. One way to do this has been to beef up
the centers educational mission (and educational appropriations). For
example, Wolfensohn has instituted a program of postgraduate training for
teachers, who spend a week or so at the Kennedy Center watching plays,
examining masks and musical instruments, writing term papers, and,
presumably, earning all-important credits that help boost their salaries.
Whether the extended field trips yield any benefits to youngsters back home
is anyones guess.

Survival by any means is, of course, the lesson of the Kennedy Center. It
may look ugly, seem pointless, and appear on the verge of physical
disintegration, but it is actually indestructible. The one thing that those
who built it and operate it have learned over the past three decades is how
to make it so.